[IP] Carnegie Mellon SCS Dean James Morris to Step Down in 2004
Office of the Provost
TO: Deans and Department Heads
FROM: Mark Kamlet
DATE: September 18, 2003
SUBJECT: SCS Dean James Morris to Step Down in 2004
Dear Friends,
After four very productive years, Jim Morris tells me he has decided to
step down at the end of his five-year term as dean of the School of
Computer Science. He will return to teaching, research and some special
projects at the end of the school year in 2004.
Under Jim's leadership, SCS has risen to new heights of excellence in
teaching, research and recognition, During Jim's tenure as dean, SCS has
been ranked first as a computer science school. Its research revenues have
increased 50 percent during the last four years and the school's budget now
tops $100 million.
SCS has broadened the scope of its undergraduate program, continuing to
make it more attractive to women and giving all students more options
outside of the basic computer science curriculum. The quality of life for
students is high, with 30 percent female enrollment in the undergraduate
program and 98 percent first-year undergraduate retention for all students.
In addition to his achievements within SCS, Jim's progressive thinking has
had a major impact on the entire university. He headed the original
initiative to establish our branch campus on the West Coast, enabling
Carnegie Mellon to become a player in the Silicon Valley and giving our
students and the university new opportunities for study, internships, and
interaction with key people and companies in that exciting part of the
country.
Jim's record of outstanding service to Carnegie Mellon extends back to the
1980s, when he became the first director of the Information Technology
Center (ITC), a joint venture with IBM that conceived and engineered the
university's original "Andrew" project. In the early 1990s, he founded and
became the first director of SCS' outstanding Human-Computer Interaction
Institute.
Jim has been a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon since 1982.
He served as head of the ITC from 1983-88. He took a leave of absence from
the university in 1990 to found and serve as the first president of MAYA
Design Group, a consulting firm specializing in product design.
A native of Pittsburgh, he received a bachelor's degree in mathematics from
Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1963. He earned master's and doctor's
degrees in management and computer science, respectively, from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1963-68. For the next five
years, he worked as an assistant professor at the University of California
at Berkeley, where he developed several important underlying principles of
programming languages. In 1974, he joined the research staff at the Xerox
Palo Alto Research Center in California. During his eight years at Xerox
PARC, he worked on the first distributed personal computer system and was a
co-discoverer of a fast method for locating a phrase inside a large body of
text. He also managed the Cedar Programming Environment project, one of the
early software production environments. He returned to Carnegie Mellon in
1982 as a visiting fellow of Xerox and was recruited to direct the Andrew
research project.
On November 10, Jim will serve as master of ceremonies at the induction of
the first group of robots and their inventors into the newly established
Robot Hall of Fame?, a joint venture of Carnegie Mellon and the Carnegie
Science Center. It's a concept he conceived, We look forward to more
exciting ideas and initiatives as Jim continues his career at Carnegie Mellon.
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